Some Criminogenic Traits of Offenders

Abstract

Who commits crime? Depending on how broad the brush, the picture we develop of the typical offender may or may not reveal patterns of traits that predispose certain people to break the law. With too fine a brush, only the accidents of single lifetimes become salient; with too broad, it is only general sociological forces that emerge. Between these two pictures—the one too specific, the other too general to be very useful—lies evidence showing offenders, on the average, to be something other than a random sampling of the population at large. This evidence, reviewed here, also makes clear that the distinguishing traits of criminals cannot be fully explained as the result of society’s treatment of them at home, in school, or in the workplace. Nor can they be entirely explained by the operation of the criminal justice system. The average offender is psychologically atypical in various respects, not necessarily to a pathological degree, but enough that the normal prohibitions against crime are in some measure ineffective. In designing public policy, it is helpful to understand that a society that successfully deters crime in 80% to 90% of its citizens may find it hard to deter it in the remaining 10% to 20% for reasons that have more to do with individual differences than with defects in policy.

Reprinted with permission from Wilson JQ (ed): Crime and Public Policy. San Francisco, Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1983. Copyright 1983 by the Institute for Contemporary Studies.